Modern medical imaging technologies offer unprecedented views into human body. Our ability to generate images is much greater than the ability to understand and interpret them. Deformable body models along with warping techniques provide means for analysis of medical images and deformable brain atlases, in particular, are useful for analysis of brain scans. The purpose of the present invention is to facilitate the interpretation of brain scans by neuroradiologists and to provide means to transfer this knowledge to other medical professionals such as neurologists and neurosurgeons.
The present inventor has developed an electronic brain atlas database [3]. There is a strong commercial interest in this database for functional neurosurgery and the atlas has been integrated with several commercial systems.
Apart from this electronic brain atlas, there are numerous brain atlases available in printed form such as [4], and a number of electronic atlases have also been constructed. The major use of the brain atlases is for neuroeducation [2]. Some other applications include functional neurosurgery and brain mapping. However, to our best knowledge, there is no commercial application of brain atlas in neuroradiology yet.
A key operation in atlas-assisted analysis is registration of the atlas with the patient data. The atlas can be warped against the data or, alternatively, the data is warped against the atlas. One of registration approaches is the Talairach proportional grid system transformation that is a piecewise linear operation applied to the volumetric image subdivided by the Talairach landmarks into 12 volumetric sub-images [4]. One known technique performs the Talairach transformation in realtime based on texture mapping, but it requires a hardware accelerator for texture mapping to be performed efficiently.
In addition, the placement of the landmarks is manual and needs domain knowledge. Several non-linear warping approaches have also been proposed [1], but they are time consuming, highly dependent on starting points and at present far from clinical applications yet.